CERES: A Set of Automated Routines for Echelle Spectra

Abstract

We present the Collection of Elemental Routines for Echelle Spectra (CERES). These routines were developed for the construction of automated pipelines for the reduction, extraction and analysis of spectra acquired with different instruments, allowing the obtention of homogeneous and standardised results. This modular code includes tools for handling the different steps of the processing: CCD image reductions, identification and tracing of the echelle orders, optimal and rectangular extraction, computation of the wavelength solution, estimation of radial velocities, and rough and fast estimation of the atmospheric parameters. Currently, CERES has been used to develop automated pipelines for thirteen different spectrographs, namely CORALIE, FEROS, HARPS, ESPaDOnS, FIES, PUCHEROS, FIDEOS, CAFE, DuPont/Echelle, Magellan/Mike, Keck/HIRES, Magellan/PFS and APO/ARCES, but the routines can be easily used in order to deal with data coming from other spectrographs. We show the high precision in radial velocity that CERES achieves for some of these instruments and we briefly summarize some results that have already been obtained using the CERES pipelines.